


A Castle and the Devil Within

by ecrivant



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, Clash of the Titans Arc (Shingeki no Kyojin), F/M, Guilt, Heartache, M/M, Melancholy, Mental Anguish, Other, Reader-Insert, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:14:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28684662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrivant/pseuds/ecrivant
Summary: The night of the ambush on Utgard Castle; the air, pregnant with the impeding deaths of his comrades.  Reiner, plagued by guilt, ruminates on the idea of loss and culpability, and with you shares a moment that will undoubtedly come to haunt him.
Relationships: Reiner Braun/Reader, Reiner Braun/You
Comments: 12
Kudos: 61





	A Castle and the Devil Within

**Author's Note:**

> canon divergent in assuming the warriors knew of zeke’s plan to attack the castle.

The group moved in the swathe of night like some serpentine unity towards an unknown. The moon, incandescent and looming high above the earth, enfolded the terrain in a ghostly haze which of all it touched made apparitions. In the air, a disconcerting quietude, silent all but for Equus footfalls dampened by sogged pasture and sniveling muzzles and the cracks and pops of low-burning torches. The topography, undulating, and from it emerged towering palisades of spruce which sectioned the land and curtailed the interminable and verdant hills. Clouds, by lunar glow illuminated and resembling exhalations in cold air arrested, roved the sky and overhung land so primeval Nyx herself present for its creation. Nocturne was refuge from the diurnal beasts who within them harbored a taste for humanity, but the cerement of pitch did little to lessen the unrest among the riders—in this world, serenity, erroneous. 

At the horizonal marge of sky and land laid twin towers seemingly erected from the earth itself. Spires traced in moonlight. As the group rode forward, exhausted and pace lagging, drawing with their path the outline of the sloping land and leaving a trail of muddled footmarks in their wake, the castle entire materialized. Surrounding the towers, a crumbling stone bulwark, at once a product of precise masonry now by worldly destruction ruined—the fortress’ impotent aegis. This manmade edifice so alien in its surroundings, as if a misplaced afterthought meant for another milieu but forgotten and left for this bucolic landscape. 

The group, looking strange and scarcely manlike, finally was before this decrepit palace—its courtyard, barricaded on three sides, was rife with debris, and vegetation grew over and between the laid stones which once formed the yard’s floor. The horses staggered on the unevenness. Each rider, form sore and tender, dismounted and tied their horses to what he or she could find and uncomfortably shifted between feet, readapting to bipedalism all but forgotten in the wake of such journeying. In this momentary recuperation, his eyes drifted to you—in no worse shape than the rest of the group, situated towards the back of their shapeless unit. Your back to him, slouched as if incurring an immense weight, and shoulders rolling beneath clothes. 

—

Within the castle, a campfire, amber alight. Pitch dispelled as if a demon exorcised. Deep shadows in visages’ creases, casted in the fiery glow. The group here indistinguishable from fatigued miscreants of past and future.

He knew outside Zeke haunted the landscape, both specter and wraith, poised to strike. He knew this verily, just as he knew you rested, a stride away, in wary repose. His guilt, corrosive. You may die tonight, and he, delirious and consumed by misguided pathos, could only wait for this terrible inevitability. And perhaps one day he would make peace with his complicity in it and see your death as one of many needed to secure Eldian posterity, but he at this moment knew better. He knew your death would in fact eviscerate him, and he knew he would never be absolved, and for it he knew, upon his own final moments, he would be driven to perdition under the weight of his transgressions against you.

Your face, with delicacy, painted in light and complexion made orange by fire’s illumination. Aura beguiling, no less so than the first encounter. If, in your voice, the proposition to forsake his life’s purpose was made to him, he would fain relinquish it. And he would invariably sacrifice his life in exchange for yours, though perhaps not in the noble light the act was so habitually painted—it was not a gesture of loving sacrifice but rather the embodiment of an abject selfishness by which he was possessed. He knew he would not be able to bear the burden of your death, regardless of whether or not by his hand delivered, and would rather himself meet this inevitable and fatal eternity than ever live to see your end. 

These terrible and penetrative thoughts of demise—a ghastly, mental seepage—were debilitating. He, as a warrior, as a member of the Survey Corps, was so well-acquainted with death yet had never acclimated to it and knew the last death to which he would bear witness would be no less harrowing than the first. And as he uncomfortably ruminated on these thoughts, he came to realize he, his presence, his mission, was the scent of death which hung over his comrades, the one which they so desperately tried to evade. Perhaps it was some unarticulated curse which followed inheritors of the titans. As misfortune and pain had fallen on his predecessors—the same who now inhabited him as ghostly memories and feelings—these miseries now fell on him, as if he was not a blank slate but rather a prewritten history destined to recount and repeat itself. Did he have any choice in what he had done or come to be? Or was the first inheritor as culpable as he in the terrible fates he wrote for those around him?

Even with his stoic form, highly controlled and for years constructed, he could not assuage the tremor in his hands or the accumulating bile which at once burned his stomach and throat.

He thought at one point he had distanced himself from you—an act of self-preservation—but you, aura infectious and penetrative, always remained. There in presence and in spirit, beside him always as if a phantasmal servant. 

Beside him you rose and waited for a moment then moved to ascend the stairs of the tower in which the group found shelter. Someone called out for you, voice indistinguishable in the muted silence; a call less words articulated and more akin to a spectral exhalation of a once-present form. Your voice in response, a quiet assurance of your safety—you simply needed a moment alone. Yet against your wishes, he erected himself and moved to accompany you, informing you of his presence rather than asking permission. 

“My knight in shining armor.” 

Voice coy. A slight smile. 

Yet, over him, horror settled, and he, overcome by unspeakable sickness, fought against the bile which threatened to spill forth. His knees trembled, and the stairs swayed and moved below him, and within him burgeoned a caustic remorse which eroded his conscience, creating from once plane morality a chasmic and unnavigable wasteland. In this moment, he wished he had returned to Marley after Marcel’s death. For his titan, and his responsibility and mission and resolve, would have been inherited by another—his entire being reduced to pitiable memories in the mind of his successor. And he would never have come to know you, or your strong resolve, or your aching concern, or your voice, velveteen, the sumptuous way you articulated his name. Or your laugh which swept past him with airy carelessness and within him bred a distant and warm and melancholic feeling, like a far-removed recollection, a memory of déjà vu. Or your quiet and unassuming history once marked by genial tranquility which was so violently uprooted by his own actions. 

He stumbled as his body anticipated a stair which was not there. Your grip on his arm, strong, steadying. His eyes met yours, and in your gaze, that stupidly sincere concern, and in his, unspoken gratitude. At the top of the tower, contained in the interstice between the outside overlook and the end of the staircase, you seated yourself against the wall and he, beside you. He tried not to think of Annie or Bertolt or Zeke or Marley or his mother who within him placed her hope entire, and instead focused on the way you smelled of campfire and cold air, and the way, among the silence, the sound of your breathing stilled his heart. With a vacant mind, he simply sat and tried to match his breath to yours.

Still trembling, he inched his hand along the stone floor until he found your touch, and he twined his fingers with yours, and aside from a slight and barely-there hesitation, you did not react. Your hand cold and his clammy, and in teenage and involuntary reaction, he felt embarrassed.

The last time he desired you so blatantly came in ambush. He could not recall the situation, or even the moment before or after, but you were together, and in movement you had drifted past him, and as his eyes followed your hallowed form, the idea of kissing you abruptly and wholly engulfed him. He often yearned for you under the shroud of night or in the aurora of dawn, in response to a smile or a laugh, in the wake of a day spent together or a moment exchanged, but never after such inaction. He had supposed it made sense: for a space, moment, to become consecrated, you merely had to occupy it, and perhaps the moments where he did not crave you, though few in number, did not truly exist and were instead simply obfuscated by your very presence. 

He rued each and every time previous he had not set aside his fear and held you. This touch, for the first time, in such a chaste and quiet way, and perhaps on the eve of your demise, felt vile. Your shared intimacy, perverse. 

But the constricting grip of your hand on his, tightened and loosened as a tide ebbs and flows in conjoined action, brought him back from his negative ruminations. As if you sensed his need to be grounded.

And the look of your face in the barely-there starlight was enough for him to press his lips to yours, a loving movement made shy by hesitance. The kiss, ephemeral and dissolving in the night as suddenly as it came to be. He pulled away, face hot at your nonreaction, but you followed his mouth as if now linked and did not let him go. Is this what it felt like to be wanted, needed? In a second, you returned to your seated position and he to his, resting in silence as if previous exchange forgotten. Or, perhaps, never having existed. He suddenly saw your mutilated corpse before him and could no longer luxuriate in the aftermath of this intimacy exchanged, the grip on his hand and the closeness of your shoulder and his own breathlessness and palpitations now feeling like heresy. 

He felt in the air your hesitation, the quietude preceding the break of a storm, before you spoke, words uttered in tone eerie as if invoked then manifested from the night itself:

“Do you trust me, Reiner?”

In few moments was he struck as speechless as this. His implicit answer was one of affirmation—he knew amply of how you so presently and continually heeded him—yet he, dazed and aphonic, spoke not. Perhaps fearful of a forthcoming dialogue in which you would state your misplaced trust on him conferred. He preemptively contemned you for saying such things, though it was scorn quickly and rightly turned on himself. You trusted him under the same pretenses he did you, and no reassurances, no matter how constant, could convince him he did not for you experience true and attested concern. It was not a matter of you falling for his acutely maintained artifice but rather one where he had, simply and unequivocally, fallen for you. 

Your gaze bore into him. Patiently waiting for his answer and seemingly unfazed by his hesitance. He swallowed and shook his head yes and spoke to substantiate this claim:

“Of course I do.”

You nodded your head as if satisfied and looked up to the ceiling in musing and spoke again after a shared and pregnant pause:

“I trust you. More than anything.”

You began another phrase, but it trailed off, lost in the night’s permeant sombre. 

And he did not hear it, instead intent on edifice around him crumbling, and conscience, crushing and destructive, under which he collapsed, and ire which burned him like flame, and dread which gored him and spilled forth his viscera, black and befouled from deceit. Intent on his blood now bile, and complexion now rotted flesh. And the eldritch bawl, suffused with ruefulness and agony and lamentation unmatched by even the most repentous sinners, which nigh spewed from his gut but instead caught in his throat in a choked sob. And intent on the manner in which he violently ripped away from you, suddenly and acutely aware of the way his hand twined in yours was the quintessence of sinful hypocrisy—what one should be made to embrace the sadistic numen who in its hands held his or her ultimate fate? And intent on the countless bodies of victims, past and future, coalescing in a single, fleshed mass of sanguine gore and tortured and malformed faces whose expressions more resembled demons than humans, each and all prostrate before him, supine in some perverted reverence like an agonous congregation in worship. 

“I feel you bear my burdens for me.”

Spoken with a quiet and slumberous quality, as if your first words after waking. His mind prayed for your silence, a wish, unarticulated, as he could only hold his head in his hands and rock forward and back with mouth open in a wordless scream. And the emotions with which he was suddenly inundated did not result in tears, and instead he sat beside you, breathing hard and in shock and doing nothing, as if struck dumb. Your hand on his shoulder, a touch which in it held such comfort and concern, which he cowered under and tore away from as if beast threatened and made prey. And upon this reaction, the space seemed too small and your presence, repugnant. The crucifix proffered before the devil. 

He himself, cursed, and now he cursed you.

The trapdoor above, wood weathered and water-logged and laying heavy and flush against the stone ceiling, burst open with a tempest gale’s force, and one of the veterans plummeted from the tower’s crown towards the floor and paid no mind to your pair and instead rushed down the stairs and called for the rest of the group. And just as suddenly as he had fallen under the yoke of his own fervor, he repressed all thought and set his jaw and ascended the final steps of the tower to emerge in the night. You beside him. 

From above, the terrain a banished landscape. The trees which once towered towards firmament’s ceiling now sat in small and sparse clusters littered over the land’s spanning hummocks. And the moon, now at arc’s crest, bewashed the purgatory below in that same haze from before, the one which made all things wraithlike and seemingly ephemeral. And within that courtyard on three sides barricaded by the crumbling bulwark and rife with lapidarius debris and vegetation made bluish by the night which encroached upon the yard’s stone foundation posed dozens of those unclad leviathans, climbing over architectural remains or coming forth from arboreal cells or clawing at the tower’s base with hands all but human and much more vehement. Monstrous and aberrant pilgrims converging on their infernal holy land. 

Knowledge of Zeke’s intentions made the sight no less grim. 

In the moments before the veterans descended upon the beasts below in instinctual response, they were struck still, shock and fear in their eyes clear. And for some reason wholly unknown to him, the reaction, so involuntary and raw and basally human, impressed upon his mind and burrowed deep within him. His body shuddering. The nightmarish air, pregnant with the threat of impending carnage, and in it, unspoken fear. 

Under blade the brutes fell silently and with their impacts shook the earth. Even with the dexterous hands with which the veterans fought, the tower’s entrance—a large and wooden and rotting door—was breached. Authoritative calls, tinged with desperation and fear and sounding more like cries, ordered the group’s remainder to secure the edifice. _To fight to their final breath_. 

He could not bring himself to look at you, yet he still felt your presence, the air around you leaden and viscous and suffused with dread. 

As he ran down the stairs, leading the charge to secure the entrance breached, he pondered his intentions. Atypical of his carefully crafted persona, and perhaps his true self, to waver in the face of danger and at the chance to protect his friends, or rather those who he had acutely deceived and convinced of his friendship, he resolved that his actions were integral to the role of Reiner—the protective and stoic hero who, out of fraternal love, laid down his life for those around him. A role with which he had no qualms assuming. Even if it was one through Paradisian Eldian’s eyes seen—he cared more about the perception than those who perceived him. But as he heard your voice with unprecedented fear call out, his name from your mouth a desperate invocation, all notions preconceived wiped away. He did not fight for the longevity of his own ego, nor even for Marley, or Bertolt or Annie or his mother, home in Liberio. In this moment, he fought for you.

Upon reaching the staircase’s base, and beyond the open door, he found himself before a titan with stretched grin and ravenous gaze, all humanity absent. In torchlight, the beast’s grimace, devilish. And he slammed the door and threw against it his weight entire and called out an indecipherable—perhaps an order, perhaps a cry for help—to the ones descending the stairs behind him. A sudden plosion of splintering wood beside his head, and through the hole created shot a fleshy and steaming appendage, furiously and blindly reaching for him. He felt shame as he realized he had already consigned to dying, and in the seconds before this infernal arm enveloped him, he thought of Marcel. And of Marcel’s scream—his final and desperate expression of abject fear—halted at its climax and then punctuated by the ferric and sour smell of fresh blood and the sound of bone crushed and brains liquified. 

No, he was not to die here. 

His movements, automated—his body, propelled away from the door and brushing against the arm which all but had him; Bertolt beside him and pushing a spear into the goliath; his form responding to a warning call, diving out of the path of the unloaded canon which flew down the stairs and as a bludgeon crushed the titan. 

His consciousness divorced from corporeal form, only united again as the agony of teeth sinking into his arm suffused him with an unknowable pain. He was made sick thinking this was the feeling which marked Marcel’s final moments.

—

Trembling hands struggling with makeshift gauze. Punctuating, shaky breaths. Though you tried to hide it, eyes focused on dressing his wounds in silence, he could see you were thoroughly harrowed by the moments prior. While he was plagued by thoughts of your death, were you by his? As much as it would cause you great suffering, he would still rather die before you—in his selfishness, he would rather have you alive and obliterated by grief than he. He was reluctant to believe true love was this selfish. Though, when one says they would die for their lover, is it a product of selflessness or self-preservation in the face of grief? Perhaps in a world different from this one, selflessness possible. 

You finished your work on his arm and sat back. He looked at you for the first time since you last spoke and found he could barely hold your gaze.

“I promise that if I die, I will be with you. _Always_. Just look for me.”

Were these his words or yours? There was no distinction in this place, voices and bodies and human and beast all made one primeval unity in this cold dark.

He wished for you to hold him. 

And when this wish remained unanswered, and the group was called to the towers peak again, and he quickly and silently ascended the stairs next to you, he became aware of a painful and agonous truth: he would never know your touch again, nor he did not deserve it, for the hours and days that followed held admittance of his duplicity; a look in your eyes which so clearly reflected how he violated you; between you, an establishment of mistrust and enmity. And he would perhaps know your touch again, but it was touch imbued with lethal intent, hateful, your vitriol unspoken but not absent, as you, with all your resolve, tried to wholly annihilate him. 

And yet, in an ironic turn where you, in your hands, suddenly held his fate in a way not dissimilar to the way he did yours, he still wished for his own death to come first, for he would not and could not resolve to live a life devoid of you.

**Author's Note:**

> ah hi there! was this one week’s worth of work? perhaps no. but i hope everyone enjoyed it regardless! thank you so much for reading and thank you to the anon who sent in a request for this fic! i loved your idea, and i hope you enjoyed the piece! 
> 
> all the recent support means the world, and feedback and all that is always so appreciated. have many requests on the way, so look forward to more stuff coming soon! 
> 
> request: ok so there’s this scenario that’s been itching my brain in the wrong place 😭😭 reiner and reader in the castle ruins? before the armored titan reveal? possibly the reader “confesses” to reiner by saying that out of everyone in the corps they trust him the most. and later on he just… does that. spare me some angst please


End file.
